Category: Articles

Some organs get all the attention. The heart is so glamorous. The liver is known for its detoxification superpowers. And the lungs! So…breathtaking.

But the kidneys? No respect.

It’s too bad–our kidneys are truly remarkable little organs. Their primary job is to filter the waste products from the blood and get rid of them through urination, but the kidneys do oh-s0-much more, working to balance electrolytes and water, and regulate blood pressure. They even help make our red blood cells!

These two little organs reside on either side of your body–if you rest on your back, they sit at about the level of your belly button. Every day your kidneys quietly do their job without complaint, filtering about 120-150 quarts of blood everyday to produce about 1-2 quarts of urine.

That is, until they do start complaining.

Slow and Sneaky Kidney Disease

Chronic kidney disease is a slow moving, long-term, decrease in kidney function. The kidney filter can be damaged by sugar in the blood (diabetes), increased pressure in the arteries (high blood pressure), immune system complexes (autoimmune disease) or toxic chemicals (lead or cadmium exposure from the environment).

Some 25% of north Americans over 65 years old are dealing with chronic kidney disease, and 3% of those will go on to kidney failure, requiring dialysis or kidney transplant. A sad fate for the hardworking and under-appreciated kidneys…and their owners.

Here’s the trouble: just like the kidney hides from the limelight, its symptoms do, too. Most people don’t even know they are experiencing chronic kidney disease because most of the time there are no symptoms at all. When symptoms do exist, they are generally not specific or severe. Weakness, fatigue, swelling in the ankles–that’s happening just because I’m getting older, right?

Even those people who do have some idea that their kidneys are not working well usually don’t truly understand their long-term risk.

It’s time to change and give the kidney the recognition and care it deserves!

The Kidney Failure Risk Equation

Now there is a great little tool that anyone can use to determine kidney risk. To use it, you need three things:

1. Your age, gender and region (whether you are north American or not)
2. A blood test called eGFR, estimated glomerular filtration rate, which measures how much waste is still left in the blood. (More equals bad.)
3. A urine test called urine albumin to creatinine ratio. This urine test measures how much albumin and creatinine are in your urine. (These are proteins that should be in the blood, so if they’re in the urine this is also bad news for the kidneys.)

The first thing on the list you have. The second two are easily done and not expensive.

We take those numbers, enter them into the Kidney Failure Risk Equation, and presto! You get some great insight into your kidney health, and your kidneys get some long-overdue love.

Your kidneys can heal, and future damage can be prevented, but not if you don’t know there’s something wrong. Love your kidneys!

If you’re interested in assessing your kidney risk, you can contact the clinic at 705-444-5331. 

We all experience stress. In fact, we’re supposed to. Our body is an adaptive wonder, and has evolved to not only deal with stress, but use it as a tool to grow. As we wrote about last month, not all stress is bad for us, and there’s evidence to suggest that the right amount, with the right beliefs, can make us stronger, smarter and happier.

But what about when it is bad? What if we’re under more stress than we need, and more often than we’d like? Let’s find out.

Stresso-Sapiens

After a whole lot of evolution, our hormones and neurotransmitters have become finely tuned to react to stress—to choose “fight or flight” as necessary.

That’s a wonderful evolutionary advantage. Back in our cave-person days, we had to deal with the occasional stressor like a war, or an attack by a lion. At those times, being able to route all our resources in an instant to the “run-away-as-fast-as-you-can” muscles was pretty handy.

But the key message here is occasional. We weren’t chased by lions all the time. A lot of the time we simply went on with our day. We lived together in close-knit groups, and ate food that we gathered or caught. We slept when the sun went to bed and woke up when the light came back out. Stressors were spaced out and we had time to recuperate in between.

But now? Now, many of us are chronically and constantly stressed by our jobs, our mortgages, the news, our food, the environment – you name it. We’re experiencing sustained stress over months and even years. That’s not what our bodies where designed to deal with.

Cortisol and You

One of the hormones we produce when we’re stressed is cortisol. This little hormone does a lot of wonderful things to allow us to deal with a stressful situation. It dumps sugar into the blood for energy, it constricts the arteries and increases our heart rate, and it also stimulates the immune system and decreases inflammation.

When we are chronically stressed, though, we can wear out our body’s ability to produce cortisol. Decreased cortisol means we have decreased energy, decreased blood flow and increased inflammation.

And guess what that leads to? Chronic pain and chronic fatigue.

The chronic pain and fatigue makes us unhappy, and less likely to do the things that reduce stress, like exercise and socialize. Which makes us even more stressed.

That’s a nasty cycle. So what to do?

The first step is to find out how your stress glands are doing. Assessing your cortisol levels can be easily and effectively done using a salivary hormone test. Four easy samples throughout the day gives a very good picture of how well, or not well your stress response is functioning.

And what do you if your adrenals are not working like they should?

1. Sleep. Rest allows your body to heal and recharge naturally, allowing your adrenal glands to rebalance.

2. Cut caffeine. Caffeine stimulates the secretion of cortisol. Trying to do so when your adrenals are worn out just makes things worse.

3. Yoga and mediation. Gentle stretching and conscious breathing help improve cortisol levels and adrenal function.

4. Exercise.  There’s a mountain of evidence that exercise reduces stress. It really is irrefutable. If your inflammation is high, don’t get crazy–you don’t need to do any triathlons or sprinting. Just a walk in nature will change your physiology. It’s that easy.

5. Supplement. There are many vitamins and herbal medicines that work wonders for tired adrenals. Intravenous B vitamins and amino acids are particularly beneficial. Your naturopathic doctor can tell you which ones are right for you.

If you’re interested in measuring your stress response, and finding a customized supplement and treatment plan for your body, contact the clinic at 705-444-5331. 

“This year I’m going to lose the weight!”

This is a sentence many of us have uttered at least once at the beginning of the new year.

People Magazine does a yearly special at this time of year called “Half Their Size”, in which they feature everyday individuals who lost at least half of their body weight or more. They print before and after shots of these amazing people and a short description of how they did it. You can see a few tidbits and some pics here.

I always buy this issue. It is truly uplifting to see the transformations, but inevitably patients also end up in our office asking about the diets, supplements and programs mentioned in the issue.

To my delight, two of the six people in the issue credited working with a naturopathic doctor as part of their success.  

I love this exposure for our profession, but I also love what it means for those two people and the many, many others who struggled to find a healthier body through naturopathic medicine–the discovery that the how of weight loss is never earth-shattering.

Working with a naturopathic doctor means that there is likely no drugs, surgery or new diet supplement involved. No miracle pills, or magic chocolate or mysterious machines that create abs from ice cream.

Instead, the “exciting new discovery that shaves away the pounds overnight” that these people learned from their naturopath probably involved sensible eating and moderate exercise. It likely meant slow, but sustainable change.

It meant looking at their whole life and asking, “Where can we create more health?” because optimal health and optimal weight go hand in hand.

If you lived in the northern latitudes of Europe during the industrial revolution, you’d have seen a common but unnerving sight: children with bowed legs and knock-knees, who looked almost “twisted”. That crooked appearance led to a label derived from an old English word for twist: rickets.

Back then, rickets was running rampant across parts of Europe, especially England and Scotland. Scientists were working on the problem—along the way they discovered solutions like cod liver oil—but it would take until the 1930’s before a deficiency of a newly discovered substance called Vitamin D would be clearly identified as the cause.

The Sunshine Vitamin
What scientists chasing a cure for rickets in the 1700’s and beyond didn’t realize was that the substance they were chasing, Vitamin D, was unique.

Cities in Europe during the industrial revolution had become large and heavily polluted. The combination of smog, and increasing amounts of time spent inside, had reduced people’s exposure to sunlight. And Vitamin D, we would eventually discover, is made from sunlight.

Unlike other vitamins, like vitamin C, which we get exclusively from our diet, vitamin D doesn’t occur in food in very high levels. We get the bulk of our vitamin D through exposure to sunlight—our bodies make it. It’s why you might have seen news articles touting the “return of rickets” because of our reduced sun exposure.

What Vitamin D Means for You
So why does vitamin D matter today? Vitamin D has many actions in the body. In fact there are receptors for it on every cell in your body. And while you’re not likely to suffer from rickets, low levels of Vitamin D are linked to a host of conditions ranging from psoriasis to thyroid conditions and osteoporosis.

For this darkening time of year, what might be most relevant is that researchers have linked low vitamin D with seasonal affective disorder, or SAD.

In our deficient patients at the clinic, an increased oral dose through the winter (or a trip to the sunny south) can make their symptoms a lot better. Vitamin D with the use of light therapy helps even more. You can read about our favourite light therapy tool in our January newsletter.

If you have concerns about SAD, or want to learn more about vitamin D testing and supplementation, you can contact the clinic at 705-444-5331.